Harvesting onions and chilies

After months of neglect, the onions, chilies and red peppers planted in May are ready. Actually they were ready a few weeks ago but it wouldn’t be right to stop my carelessness now.

Freshly lifted onions

One result of waiting too long to pick them is that the onions lost their leaves so I can’t create the plaited onion string nicely illustrated in my gardening book. I’ve heard that onions should be kept for a while to let the taste mellow and I was looking forward to having a string of them; so much so that I used all my ingenuity and found a substitute for the leaves – string!

The thing with onion strings is you need somewhere to hang them. I hadn’t realised how heavy the onions would be and the stick-on plastic hook in the kitchen isn’t up to the job. My book also says they should be kept somewhere cool, bright and dry which leaves the options for storage rather limited in our house. Anyway, all of this nonsense explains why, right now, there’s a rather ugly looking string of onions lying in my bath tub.

Onions in my bath

Putting that down in words makes it seem all the more absurd – I’ll find another home for the onions after writing this.

The sweet red peppers were not a great success. We got 3 small red peppers in total and if the first pepper we ate a while ago is anything to go by the two left won’t be that sweet either.

Luckily the chili peppers have been very successful and I’m hopeful we’ve got enough to last us until next year’s harvest! We’ve already used a couple in cooking and they have a nice heat to them – they are also a gloriously rich red!

All our peppers

Did a bit of re-jigging the shrubs and heathers and planted my garlic and overwintering onions too! I’ll write about that later, when the onions are out of the bath.